******************************************************************[Note: Our thanks to Prof. LEE PengYee (Republic of Singapore) for sharingthisarticle with us. Prof. Lee suggests that we can find the latest news oncontent reductionat <www.moe.edu.sg>. This is the last of 3 notes on Singapore education.******************************************************************

From The Sunday Times (Singapore), August 3, 1997, p. 9

Thinking Schools Make a Learning Nation

Sidebar: Education Minister Teo Chee Hean put forward his bold vision forthe education system when he addressed Parliament on Wednesday. Thesystem, he said, must gear itself for change if it were to meet thechallenges that would come with a rapidly changing world. To achieve this,there must be thinking schools, where teachers and principals are alwayslearning and coming up with innovative ideas to meet the needs of theirstudents. We reproduce below excerpts of his speech.

Our education system is fundamentally a good one. Our students have donewell. Our teachers, schools and educational institutions have done well.

The evidence for this can be seen from the achievements of our students inthe various examinations: the high percentage of our students who now makeit through our institutes of higher learning, and the high standards inmathematics and science that have been attained by our students and asdemonstrated in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study.

We have done well because of the many changes and the important policiesthat have been put in place in our education system over the last five, 10years. We are reaping the fruits of these changes today, as education is avery long-term process.

But we can reach higher and we can do better. And the changes that we areputting in place in our education system now are meant to see us throughinto the next century.

The Ministry of Education has made several major announcements in the pasthalf year.

These are major programmes and major changes, and I can understand ifteachers and parents have a certain amount of anxiety about how all thesethings are going to come together.

I would like to take this opportunity to place these various programmes andchanges in perspective to show how these various strands draw together:national education, information technology, creative thinking as well asadministrative excellence in our schools.

21st-century schools

The goal that we are reaching for is "Thinking Schools". This encapsulatesour vision for the schools of the 21st century.

This is a concept that Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong spoke about during the"Thinking Conference" in June this year when he put forward his vision for"Thinking Schools and a Learning Nation".

While our education system has undergone changes in the past and producedcommendable results, we cannot rest on our laurels. We need to be gearedfor continuing change to meet the needs of the 21st century.

The world we are living in is changing. And our education system mustchange to keep pace.

The body of human knowledge is growing day by day. And the discovery ofnew knowledge continues. Our education system has to cope with thisexplosion of knowledge.

The solution does not lie in simply adding more to the curriculum with eachpassing year. We have to adopt a different strategy -- teach our students,our young generation, how to acquire knowledge as more knowledge isdiscovered in the future.

There are changes in the workplace, in the nature of jobs, in the skillsrequired; and we must continually seek new knowledge and new skills totransition to higher-level jobs.

There are new techniques and innovations in education. If you look back atour schools, we have transitioned from blackboard and chalk to overheadprojectors and transparencies, even educational television.

There is not much difference in the pedagogical style. Basically, thestudents are there, they are receiving lessons from the teacher.

But with information technology and the Internet, there will be arevolution. There can be different ways of interactivity, different waysfor students to access knowledge, different ways of combining studentstogether in different classes, different schools, different places in theworld to learn together and share together.

The changes will not be once off. They will come wave upon wave as thepower of computers and networks continues to increase.

This will have ramifications not only on teaching but perhaps in thestructure of our schools in future.

We are talking about virtual schools that will take some time to come, butthere will certainly be applications for people already in the workplace,for example.

There will be different assessment systems. The scholastic aptitude testin the United States today is taken by computer, I think, from this year.This will need a different way of assessing and adapting people.

Everyone is grappling with this and no one quite knows the answer yet. Wealso have to feel our way forward.

Our population and our society are changing. There is a new generation,new influences, television, travel.

Their frame of reference and mind-set is changing. We need to continue tofind new ways of engaging, interesting and exciting our young people todiscover and learn in schools.

We must also make sure at the same time that they remain rooted in Singapore.

Our young people need values and a sense of belonging. They need culturaland societal ballast so that they will not capsize or lose their way inthis bewildering sea of contesting ideas.

We need to strengthen our cohesion as a people and work together for abetter life for all Singaporeans. That is why National Education is suchan important element in our thinking schools.

We also need a new focus on creativity and innovation, to be geared tochange in our schools. We cannot produce adaptable, innovative andcreative students unless we have adaptable, creative and innovativeteachers and schools.

The pace of change has quickened. In the past, the way that we havemanaged change in the Ministry of Education is rather top down.

Ideas are tossed up, discussed at meetings, we consider them, we thinkabout it, write a few papers. If they get approved, we pilot it in a fewschools first. We try it out for a year or two, we spread it to more, thenwe spread it to all the schools.

This takes many years for any change to come through our school system.

We must encourage innovation and thinking in the schools so that manydifferent ideas and approaches can be tried at the same time. Good ideasshould be shared and spread between schools and multiplied quickly.

Keep our strengths

However, we must remember what are the strengths of our education system.We must retain control of a few key areas.

We need to maintain our national curriculum and the high national standardsthat we have. This will ensure that the rigour and the discipline in oureducation system are retained and that what our students learn meets oureducational objectives and standards are maintained.

This is very important. Otherwise, at the end of the day, the certificatethat our students receive may be wrapped up in a nice red tube -- it ismeaningless unless the standards and the quality are maintained.

There must be benchmarks which our schools and our students are expected toachieve.

Other countries that do not have such standards are moving towards them.The United Kingdom, for example, has reintroduced a national curriculum formost subjects across all levels and instituted national standard tests forpupils at ages seven, 11, 14, 16.

I was in the US recently and President Clinton and (Education) Secretary(Richard) Riley, whom I also met there, are pushing hard for nationalstandards.

But it is difficult for them to push this through because the FederalGovernment has no direct authority over education and they have to persuadestates to come on board to adopt national standards for the territory.

But these two countries, among others, have studied the results of theThird International Maths and Science Study and realised that they cannotimprove unless they push for standards, high standards.

We need to keep these aspects of our education system and the rigour anddiscipline in our education system so that we will always have a systemthat sets and demands high standards from our schools, our teachers and ourstudents and consequently, will produce the high standards and the resultsthat we want for our children.

New and fresh ideas

But within these boundaries, I am prepared to consider new and fresh ideason how to achieve a high standard in our educational system and to meet oureducational objectives.

We will not change precipitously because we have a good education systemand I am in no hurry to dismantle it. But we need to encourage ideas andinnovation on how to achieve our goals.

We will devolve more powers to make decisions, to decide on educationalstrategies for achieving our educational objectives, to make decisions onthe use of resources and on personnel and financial matters.

We want to get a better match between the authority to make decisions onthe use of resources and responsibility for achieving educational outcomes.

These are the broad challenges that our thinking schools must meet.

What's a thinking school?

Now, what is a thinking school? The foremost prerequisite of a thinkingschool is that it must itself be a learning organisation.

The mindset of continual change must pervade each and every member ofstaff. A culture of continual improvement must permeate the entire school.

The key to any learning organization is its people. As exemplars of thespirit of lifelong learning, every teacher has to be a continual learnerhimself, seeking constantly to upgrade his instructional competencies.

As professional practitioners, every teacher must keep abreast of thelatest in educational research, every teacher must innovate and adaptclassroom practices and keep up with the advances in his own subject.

An attitude of active ongoing learning is crucial for every teacher andthey are ultimately responsible for motivating and realising their ownprofessional development.

This not change for the sake of change. What teachers must strive for ischange that is carefully thought through, based on new but sound principlesand test them and expand on them and improve on them.

This is the continuing professional challenge that should keep our teachersexcited about their job for five, 10, 20, 30, 40 years in their teachingcareer. He has to go on creating and innovating, modifying and adapting.

Yes, teachers are facilitators but this is a term which is too neutral formy liking. A facilitator suggests that it just allows the student to learn.

Our principals and teachers are the heart and soul of our education system.They make a difference to what our students learn, their motivation leveland how they learn.

They are meant to have an effect on their students. They cannot merely beneutral facilitators. I think that is much too neutral a term.

They provide the motivation, the inspiration, sometimes the extra push toget the students going so that they can achieve something beyond what eventhe students themselves thought they could achieve.

This is the role of teachers and principals -- not merely to facilitate thestudents to do whatever it is that the students want or like to do.

Collective creativity

All this sounds like a tall order. Indeed, it would be a tall order ifteachers have to work alone. The results of solitary effort will besubject to the limits of one's own creativity.

One of the catalyst of creativity is bouncing ideas off one another,allowing other people's ideas to trigger one's own.

Therefore teachers will have to work together. Teachers within theirsubjects and departments will be encouraged to generate and share ideasabout how best to motivate the pupils and deliver difficult concepts andskills.

The collective effort of teachers and schools must be harnessed to identifybottlenecks to workflow and hindrances providing quality education.

The Ministry is committed and will provide every support for teachers andschools. We have a number of programmes on to help prepare our teachersfor some of these changes that are coming.

I agree ... that if you just introduce computers in the schools and do nottrain the teachers properly, nothing will happen or the wrong things mayhappen.

So a large part of the resources that we are allocating for the IT masterplan goes into the training of teachers.

It is not just the training of teachers to use particular software packagesbut the training of teachers to use computers in the teaching environment,to teach the subjects that they are teaching.

To help prepare our teachers, our goal is for every teacher to have atleast 100 hours of training per year by the year 2000.

Helping teachers

The Ministry is also committed to providing teachers a more conduciveworking environment and this will range from things like better staff roomsto better working conditions in general. We want to give them theresources to do their jobs well.

More importantly, the Ministry recognises that the workload of our teachersis very high and we are taking steps to try to ease the workload of ourteachers.

There is no single magic bullet solution for this. This will come partlythrough the use of technology, partly through providing a comprehensiverange of administrative and other teacher supports and partly through areview of the curriculum.

Most importantly, if we are able to sustain the recruitment of teachersover a number of years, we will be able to post more teachers to schools inthe coming years.

We recruited 1,900 teachers last year, the best for many years. This year,the recruitment rate looks good. We should come close to what we did lastyear. If we can sustain this over a number of years, we will be better off.

The aim is to give teachers space to reflect and time to think so that theycan devote more time and energy to continually strive for professionalimprovement.

Of course, we will recognise teachers for their efforts. We haverestructured and improved the terms of service and promotion andadvancement prospects.

Just to give you an example, since February 1995, in four promotionexercises, some 16,000 teachers and principals have been promoted.

A thinking school also provides novel solutions to problems they face overa wide range of issues.

Every school is unique in its own way. It has got a slightly differentpupil profile, different inclinations and needs, a different schoolculture, different strengths and weaknesses.

So, each school guided by the principal, together with all the teachers,will have to tailor their own solutions to school problems and decide howbest to integrate new programmes into the school.

Schools also have to get together to share their experiences and hence,this is one of the main motivating factors for introducing the schoolcluster programme.

We will consider whether to put autonomous schools and independent schoolsinto a cluster so that they can share the experiences and ideas that theyhave.

We will give these clusters extra resources and greater freedom of action.We will encourage them to work together, share ideas and try things thatthey could not do previously on their own.

In the coming years as we get more experience with the clusters, we willdevolve more authority and freedom of action to them.

Ministry must change

The role of the Ministry of Education will also have to change. For theMinistry to support thinking schools, the Ministry itself will have to be alearning organisation.

At the systems level, the Ministry will do what individual teachers andschools are doing, which is to challenge traditional principles andpractices, study the changing educational needs of the nation, chartgeneral directions for the service and provide guidelines to mould theeducation system.

The Ministry's role is to set the overall policy, set out the educationalobjectives and standards to be achieved and provide the schools, theprincipals and the teachers with the resources to get the job done.

Thinking schools will generate many good ideas and the Ministry willfacilitate the sharing of ideas across schools so that the best teachingand school management practices can be shared.

We will do things like set up web sites, so that teachers can easily talkto each other and share their ideas.

We will also encourage the various professional associations of teachers,for example, the science teachers or the geography teachers, so that theycan get together and share their ideas.

We want to tap the creativity and energy of all of our 23,000 educationofficers to come up with new ideas, to share them, to test them, to devisenew programmes and practices and extend and apply them in all our schoolsin a continuing process of learning, improvement and change.

And when this happens, thinking schools will drive our education system inhigh gear into the 21st century.

As the Prime Minister has said, the future will be one of change, notchange to a known fixed state but change as an ongoing state of things.

To prepare for the next generation, education will also have to be a stateof continual improvement.

Education must stay ahead of this change. Education will mould the futureof our nation and if Singapore is to become a learning nation, we will haveto begin in our schools.

When our young enter into the workforce and take on responsibilities insociety, they will carry with them the values and skills that will enablethem, each one of them, to strive for excellence in the way they contributeto the nation.

Our thinking schools will lay the foundations for a culture of learning inSingapore society. Then will we be able to have a learning nation."**************************************************************Jerry P. BeckerDept. of Curriculum & InstructionSouthern Illinois UniversityCarbondale, IL 62901-4610 USAFax: (618)453-4244Phone: (618)453-4241 (office)E-mail: JBECKER@SIU.EDU